IN AN ideal world, my column would arrive this week heralded by one of those hand-coloured maps that appear at the beginning of films like Casablanca and, er, Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

"Who really wants to shuffle around old ruins with just strangers for company?" []

It would depict a large ship steaming from Napoli to Mykonos, accompanied by appropriate bouzouki music and a clipped English voice-over.

Yes, there is no point in pretending, loyal readers, that I am chained to a desk. I am sailing off the coast of Greece with my family on board the fabulous Ruby Princess ocean liner, halfway through a Mediterranean cruise that has so far taken us to Monte Carlo, Florence, Napoli and Rome.

What’s more, here’s something I have always longed to write – a funny thing happened on the way to Pompeii…I have always had something of a soft spot for tour guides, that odd race of people born, seemingly, to bustle along at the head of a crocodile of sweaty and bewildered-looking sightseers.

Amid the ruins of Pompeii, I met the ultimate tour-guide, let’s call him Luigi to spare his blushes, a bloke so immersed in his subject that if he’d finished the day covered in Vesuvian ash, no one would have been the least surprised.

A short, balding, moustachioed Neapolitan, (“it is a language,” he declared, “not slang!”) there was something so dandy-ish and theatrical about Luigi that it was difficult to take your eyes off him. He conducted the tour in a purple polo shirt and (touch of sartorial genius this) matching purple loafers, mopping the sweat from his brow with an enormous silk handkerchief of canary yellow.

At certain points this handkerchief would be twisted, knotted and flourished to illustrate various parts of his story.

“Pompeii,” he told us, as we journeyed to the site, “is like an English disco on a Friday night – packed. So you must

stay close around me like beautiful flowers.” Luigi wanted us all to imagine ourselves as the doomed Pompeiians, caught up in disaster as we went about our daily tasks of making lots of money, visiting the bakery and sneaking off to the red-light district.

“But you must also stay in the shade,” he counselled, wagging a finger, “or our two-hour tour will be over in an hour and you’ll all want to go back to the coach.”

In truth, though, he acted out the whole disaster for us, first swaggering up and down the halfburied streets and gulleys as a rich merchant then dashing back and forth, hanky flying, as the ash and stone rained down. To underline the dramatic moment when Vesuvius first erupted Luigi tore the baseball cap from his bald head and tossed it high into the air with a flourish: “Pft!!”

“You must imagine the people screaming, the sheer panic, the dogs barking!” he declared, wide-eyed, just as one of the several dogs at the site sauntered past in the heat. Yet he knew his subject intimately, from the precise intricacies of water supply, drainage and sewage disposal to the class system and snobberies of the townspeople themselves.

In the midst of his declamations on these subjects, delivered in a strange mixture of Italian and curiously old-fashioned English, Luigi seemed almost like David Suchet’s Poirot outlining a dénouement. Alongside Pompeiian politics he also understood the politics of present day tourguiding, fending off frequent sorties by other groups who wanted to get in front of us at various points.

At the beginning of the tour we had all been given little receivers and earpieces to wear so that we could hear his commentary even from the back of the group. As the morning progressed our right ears were full of the heated exchanges he was having: “No, I’m sorry, my group was first. I must insist! I will insist!”

At the town brothel he insisted a party of Germans was held back so that we could file first past the concrete beds and fading frescoes of elaborate intercourse. For me it is characters like this guide who make a sightseeing holiday truly memorable, for who really wants to shuffle around ruins with an over-earnest guide book and a crush of strangers for company?

In his enthusiasm and zeal for living history, Luigi had much in common with Neil MacGregor of the British Museum, whose History Of The World In 1,000 Objects has proved so groundbreaking on radio and the approach of both is what’s badly needed in our schools.

I’ve already suggested the British Museum takes up some sort of role in setting and structuring the history syllabus but maybe we should be importing the Luigis of the world too. Spotty umbrellas aloft! Tour guides, your time has come.